Re: st: tabulate produces inconsistent output?

The only suggestion so far is that I update my Stata. But I am fully
updated and there are no further updates available, so that is not the
problem.

I am very concerned because there are no errors or any other problems
whatsoever that would indicate a faulty installation or the like. There
are no red flags, only clearly incorrect output.

Christian
On 11/19/2011 1:42 PM, Christian Raschke wrote:

Hello Stata-listers,

I am running into the following very odd problem: I have a factor
variable that I would like to -tabulate-, but every time I use -tab-,
I get different results. When running -tab- back to back on the same
variable in the same data set I get entirely different results every
time.

All the years that I have used Stata, I've never had anything like
this happen, so I am totally stumped. There are only 2 variables in my
data set: a variable "ID" that is storage type double and the variable
"pldel" that is storage type byte.

Please see what I copied and pasted at the end of this email straight
from my interactive session. The same oddity occurs if I use the -tab
pldel, gen()- syntax; in that same session I continue to get different
results every time I run a simple tab, so the below are just two
arbitrary examples.

If I open a new clean session of Stata, then tab works as expected. I
did not define any user defined programs or do anything anything else
of that nature in the broken session. The only commands in my Command
History are various versions of -use-, -tab-, -count-, -describe-, and
-browse-.

So, what might have happened to break a basic command like -tab-? I
know that using a new session fixes the immediate problem at hand, but
I want to ensure that something like this does not happen in any of my
data analyses in the future!